Still waiting on them to ban those fake accounts.
Twitter to ban political advertising
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im scared of such arguments. And im telling you as a libertarian. No, private companies should be regulated and shareholders cant be the only voice to be heard. I mean, what if starbucks shareholders decide that, lets say, african americans are no longer allowed to buy coffe on their shops. Would it be ok to allow it?
No. We have the civil rights act of 1964.
So you agree that they should be regulated. Law is regulation.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#503Freedom of expression inherently includes the freedom to pay for expression. What are your expression worth if you wouldn’t be able to pay a service, cellphone/internet connection/reddit gold to express that? How is paying ads different than paying a campaigner set up a loudspeaker in the middle of a city? But then again, since twitter is a private enterprise, I fully respect their right to act on their own platform.
Citizens United is the example that shows it's more complicated than that. Once limits are removed, then the same power structures that make and keep powerful entities powerful can continue to be reenforced if checks are not put into place to limit the power money can have in being a vector or amplifier for free speech. What paying for expression has come to is that you can dominate discourse simply by paying more. S…
Ads sometimes help the underdog much more than they help the already-known incumbent - ads can put them both on equal footing if the volume is reasonable.
I've discovered new small family restaurants I never would have noticed if I didn't get their postcard ads. Similarly, thanks to ads I've heard of new political candidates challenging long-time incumbent politicians - they may be spending much less than the incumbent but they could afford to write me a postcard.
Maybe instead of a digital ban, there could be rationing on a per-user basis of how often they are repeatedly shown a political ad from the same faction. That way challengers can get their word in.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum - it's really inspiring to see a company take a stand against political advertising, if it can't be properly vetted. One more step to strengthen our democracy.
The contrarian view is that banning political advertising favors incumbents in elections. The incumbents are already known. Challengers have to make themselves known, and paid advertising is one of the main ways that is possible.
I have a hard time buying into that contrarian view in a post-Cambridge Analytica world. If anything, it feels like whataboutism to me. While Twitter is trying to deal with the mass corruption of democracy around the world from micro-targeted lies, they want to talk about some kid's high school student president campaign.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility. I'm still kind of amazed that the government hasn't cracked down on bitcoin miners for hosting child pornography yet; every full node is hosting it. If the government ever wants to crack down on blockchains they have a valid legal excuse. The longer they go without cracking down, the more it seems like we as a society are accepting the existence of…
> I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it. How are those companies going to make money from hosting tweets? Are you letting blockchain hosts inject things? If so that's a security & privacy nightmare just waiting to happen. If not, it's financially insane to host it unless twit…
The same question can be asked of Twitter. Twitter serves up other content alongside tweets, and makes a profit doing it (as of last year). Is this a privacy nightmare? Yup. Is it more of a privacy nightmare if a different company does it? Depends on the company. Maybe a given user will trust a given provider more than they trust Twitter, or maybe they'll like their ad policy more, or maybe they'll be willing to pay a premium to not be served ads, or maybe they'll want to search through tweets using more specific filters than Twitter allows. To me, choice of provider sounds like something that should increase security for those who desire it and educate themselves. For those who don't, there are other tradeoffs they can make.
This all assumes I'm interpretting Dorsey's statements correctly, and of course I may not be.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#506Does this not give an advantage to people like Trump, who have a large following and media attention, thus letting them still "advertise" via their own tweets? Couldn't people with large followings take money to tweet on behalf of others?
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#507I'm still not sure what I think about the ban, but one potential downside is it will give people with lots of organic reach, like celebrities and incumbents, a big advantage. Before you could use organic reach to combat paid reach and vice versa, but now organic reach is the only thing that counts. For example, if The Rock runs for governor of California next year, it will be very hard for his opponents to compete (a…
Isn't organic reach a little more meritocratic than just throwing money into paid ads?
It is, but I also suspect that more checks and balances would be a good thing in this situation.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#508Does this not give an advantage to people like Trump, who have a large following and media attention, thus letting them still "advertise" via their own tweets? Couldn't people with large followings take money to tweet on behalf of others?
This is just another way of saying that advertising has evolved and twitter is only cracking down on advertising 1.0 and not advertising 2.0
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#509I'm still not sure what I think about the ban, but one potential downside is it will give people with lots of organic reach, like celebrities and incumbents, a big advantage. Before you could use organic reach to combat paid reach and vice versa, but now organic reach is the only thing that counts. For example, if The Rock runs for governor of California next year, it will be very hard for his opponents to compete (a…
Isn't organic reach a little more meritocratic than just throwing money into paid ads?
The effect of "meritocracy", at least in this context, is not linear. Every incremental unit of influence or fame (followers, impressions, etc) leads to super-linear influence between some interval (probably tapers off at the tail).
And it is not independent / non-zero sum. If "A" gets more influence, it may take from "B"'s opportunity. And if the growth function is indeed super-linear, then B's opportunity is very quickly squashed.
Re: Twitter to ban political advertising
#510I'm still not sure what I think about the ban, but one potential downside is it will give people with lots of organic reach, like celebrities and incumbents, a big advantage. Before you could use organic reach to combat paid reach and vice versa, but now organic reach is the only thing that counts. For example, if The Rock runs for governor of California next year, it will be very hard for his opponents to compete (a…
As much as I'm not a fan of celebrity politicians, the situation you describe sounds pretty democratic.
The other side of the original argument is this: someone like The Rock has a huge advantage, but on the other hand anyone without a following will be at a huge disadvantage. What happens if a celebrity politician tweets a falsehood like "my opponent supports VileIdeaXYZ" and the opponent has 300 Twitter followers and can't pay to promote a tweet?
I don't think a system that favors people based on how much money they have access to is great, but I also don't think a system that elects people based on their fame is great. Having both paid and unpaid options for reach provides a little bit more balance.